The Black Dog, and Other Stories

by A. E. Coppard

“Yes, I would kill you.”

“But you have told me that if I can keep you here in England I may do it. You know. If I can. You know that, Johannes!”

Bugloss was persuaded that he had heard her voice before, though he could not recognize the speaker.

“Be quiet, you are a fool,” the man said. That was all Bugloss heard. It was brutal enough. If only a woman, any woman, had wanted him like that!

He wandered about during other dances. The green-haired girl was always with that idiotic pirate, and it made things very difficult, because although Bugloss had fallen desperately in love with her he could not, simply could not, march up and drag her away from her companion. He could not as yet even venture from his ambush among the trees, and they never wandered in the gloom—they were always dancing together or eating together. He, Bugloss, had no interest in any other woman there, no spark of interest whatsoever. That being so, why go to all the fuss of discarding the mackintosh and making an exhibition of himself? Why go bothering among that crowd, he was not a dancer at all, he didn’t want to go! But still ... by and by perhaps ... when that lovely treasure was not so extraordinarily engaged. Sweet God! she was just ... well, but he could not stand much more of that infernal pirate’s antics with her. Withdrawing his tantalized gaze he sat down in darkness behind a clump of yew trimmed in the shape of some fat animal that resembled a tall hippopotamus. Here he lit his tenth cigarette. At once a dizziness assailed him, he began to see scarlet splashes in the gloom, to feel as if he were being lacerated with tiny pins. Throwing the cigarette away he stretched himself at full length under the bush. Scarcely had he done so when he became aware that two others were sitting down on the other side of it, the same foreign couple, the vivandière and her threatening cavalier.

“Listen to me, Hélène,” the man was saying in a soft consoling voice, “you shall trust to me and come away. Together we will go. But here I cannot stay. It is fate. You love, eh? Come then, we will go to Copenhagen, I will take you to my country. Now, Hélène!”

The lady made no reply; Bugloss felt that she must be crying. The Dane continued to woo and the Frenchwoman to murmur back to him: “Is it not so, Johannes?” “No, Hélène, no.” But at last he cried angrily: “Pah! Then stop with your bandit, that pig! Pah!” and chattering angrily in his strange language he sprang up and stalked away. Hélène rose too and followed him beseechingly into the gloom: “No, no, Johannes, no!”

Bugloss got up from the grass; his dizziness was gone. He knew that voice, it seemed impossible, but he knew her, and he had half a mind to rush home: but being without his watch and unable to discover what o’clock it was, he did not care to walk out into the streets with the chance of being guyed by any half-drunken sparks passing late home. He would wait, he was sure it was past midnight now, there would be a partial exodus soon, and he would go off unnoticed in the crowd. There was no more possibility now of him shedding his coat and joining the revellers than there was of that beauteous girl flying into his arms; his inhibition possessed him with tenfold power, he was an imbecile. Sad, pitiful, wretched, outcast! Through the screen of foliage the music floated with exquisite faintness, luminous cadenzas from a gleaming but guarded Eldorado whose light was music, whose music was all a promise and a mockery; he was a miserable prisoner pent in his own unbearable but unbreakable shackles and dressed up like a doll in a pantomime! Many people had come in their ordinary clothes; why, O why had he put on this maddening paralysing raiment? Why had he come at all?

Some of the lights had begun to fade; at one end of the lawn most of the small lamps had guttered out, leaving a line of a dozen chairs in comparative obscurity. Weary of standing, he slunk to the corner chair and sat down with a sigh. Just beside him was a weeping ash that he supposed only looked happy when it rained, and opposite was a poplar straining so hard to brush the heavens that he fancied it would be creaking in every limb. By and by an elderly decorous lady, accompanied by two girls not so decorous—the one arrayed as a Puritan maiden and the other as a Scout mistress—came and sat near him, but he did not move. They did not perceive the moody Bugloss. The elderly lady spoke: “Do go and fetch her here; no, when this waltz is over. She is very rude, but I want to see her. I can’t understand why she avoids us, and how she is getting on is a mystery to everybody. Bring her here.”

The puritan maiden and the scout mistress, embracing each other, skipped away to the refreshment booth. Glorious people sat about there drinking wine as if they disliked it, sipping ices as if it were a penance, and eating remarkable food or doing some other reasonable things, but Bugloss dared not join them although he was very hungry. It was not hunger he wanted to avert, but an impending tragedy.